To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Monday, March 27, 2017

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras: excerpt from “The Man in Tweed: The City,” a Twitter-constructed Novel in Progress (with a follow-up note on the process)

Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne
Jill Levine

On the other side of the
street, as if it were on the other side of the ocean, there is a sign: “Café.”
The man in tweed waits for the light to change.

While he crosses the street,
the man in tweed remembers the first time he drank coffee. Another time,
another world: a smell of jungle in the steam.

On the sidewalk in front of
the café are two little tables. One of them is occupied by a vaguely familiar
looking old man who stares at the man in tweed.

The old man smiles, a
toothless gesture. The man in tweed swallows saliva and enters the place. A fan
revolves on the ceiling like a wasp.

The only customer inside the
establishment is sitting in front of a laptop. The man in tweed glimpses an
internet page: Twitter.

The customer with the laptop
writes at that moment something related to a man in tweed in a café. The man in
tweed shivers.

“Good morning,” says the girl
behind the counter, her dark hair tied at the back of her neck. The man in
tweed takes a hesitant step toward her.

“I am lost and need
directions,” mumbles the man in tweed. “We are all lost,” the girl says,
“tomorrow is the first day of spring.”

“I know what you’re getting
at,” says the man in tweed thinking of black pollen, “but right now I need to
orient myself.” “You can’t find the north,” says the girl.

The idea of the north, the man
in tweed remembers, and he agrees. “Will you help me?” “Yes,” the girl says,
“but first you must buy something.”

Frantic, the man in tweed
scrutinizes the chalkboard behind the counter. It’s filled with names that mean
absolutely nothing to him: hieroglyphics.

An image emerges slowly from
the memory of the man in tweed. A speeding train breaches the dark night like a
bright zipper.

“Espresso,” whispers the man
in tweed, and the express train vanishes into the tunnel in his mind. “See?”
says the girl, smiling, “that wasn’t so hard.”

The smile that the man in tweed
attempts to return ends up being an indescribable grimace. “You need a double,”
the girl says, and turns around.

While the girl prepares the
coffee, the man in tweed catches a glimpse of the back of her neck. There,
among a few rebellious hairs, shines a ruby-colored butterfly.

***

The tattoo seems to flutter on
the girl’s neck as if wanting to flee its prison of skin. The man in tweed
imagines a milky sky.

In the midst of that
whiteness, the man in tweed sees a trace of moving blood: butterflies. Beneath
the whiteness, the gardens of the world boil.

The man in tweed observes
thousands of chrysalises opening in the gardens. Nude girls emerge, their young
bodies glowing like fire.

The girls rise up, throwing
off the viscous threads that cling to them. The rite of spring, muses the man
in tweed.

The blood butterflies come
down from the sky to enmesh with the bodies of the girls. The man in tweed
hears a voice: “Your coffee’s ready.”

The girl with the tattoo hands
him the cup as if it were a chalice, from which arises fingers of steam. The
man in tweed catches a crimson gleam in her eyes.

The vanes of the fan cut the
sudden silence. The man in tweed takes the coffee and turns around. The
customer with the laptop has disappeared.

“Who was the man with the
computer?” says the man in tweed. “I think he’s a writer. Strange guy. He often
comes here,” the girl replies.

“And who is the man sitting
out there?” the man in tweed points to the table on the sidewalk. “That’s not a
man,” the girl answers.

Disturbed, the man in tweed
looks at the girl. “Then what is he?” he says. “I don’t know, but he comes
everyday,” says the girl. “He’s the old man.”

“You haven’t wanted to find
out who he is?” the man in tweed says. “The name doesn’t matter,” says the
girl. “He’s the old man and he’s one hundred years old. Or a thousand.”

The girl’s voice has begun to
creak like papyrus paper. The man in tweed notices that her skin is getting
whiter and whiter as if her blood were escaping.

“I’m sure the old man can give
you the directions you need,” says the girl. “He seems familiar to me,” admits
the man in tweed.

“Maybe you’ve seen him in a
distant dream,” murmurs the girl. “I don’t usually dream,” says the man in
tweed, and he thinks he hears the fluttering of the tattoo on her neck.

. . . . . . .

A Note
on the Preceding

A
Man of Tweets

I
saw him on Monday, March 7, 2011, at midday. I noticed him because he was
dressed in a manner more suited to winter than to spring, which was already
proclaiming its sultry languor in bloom amid the jacarandas that were spreading
their purple fire along the streets of Mexico City. He was about to cross an
avenue near the apartment I rent in a neighborhood downtown, but for some
inexplicable reason he had stopped in his tracks. It was as if someone—an inner
voice rather than from the outside—had ordered him to stand perfectly still on
the sidewalk, his eyes staring at an ambiguous zone in the distance. I paused
next to him because I thought the traffic light was preventing us from moving,
but that wasn’t it—and at that moment I was able to register his tweed jacket,
the slightly disproportionate size of his eyeglasses, the fact that he wasn’t
sweating despite the excess of his overcoat in the (almost) springtime heat,
and especially the curious milky opalescence of his skin which made him look
like a stranger in town, a man who was not where he belonged. I crossed the
avenue and when I got to the other side I turned around: he was still standing
in the same position or at his post, his eyes drawn by some unfathomable
magnet. I continued walking home, thinking of two of my all-time favorite
stories (“The Man of the Crowd” and “Bartleby”), the shadowy creatures of Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and a quotation from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the great novel by Haruki Murakami:
“You turn a corner and find a world you had never seen before.”

Once in my apartment I connected to the
Internet and got on Twitter, that virtual aviary where birds try to find their
own voice amid a deafening hue and cry. I remembered the individual I had just
bumped into and wrote: “A man with enormous eyeglasses and a tweed jacket stares
engrossed at the horizon on a busy corner. The sun lends him an otherworldly glow.”
And a little later: “I think I notice that the man in the enormous eyeglasses
and the tweed jacket moves his lips. I think I hear him mutter: ‘Look at me
carefully. I could be your character.’”

I hadn’t suspected that this would
be the beginning of a serial novelette or noveletweet that would claim my
attention for over a month—I finished it on Thursday, April 14, 2011—and that
it would generate what would be for me an unanticipated
interest in a group of readers—I like to speak of readers and not simply
followers—that would grow exponentially alongside a plot centered precisely on
this character: a man assembled by tweets assuming that he is not where he
should be and who therefore undertakes a sort of anti-Odyssey which tries to
fuse fantasy and terror, classic adventure and metaphysical drift, the
possibility of parallel universes and the uneasiness with the reality that
surrounds us. Now that the man in tweed walks on his own feet thanks to the
account I opened for him on Twitter (@Elhombredetweed);
now that the series he stars in already has three episodes or parts exceeding
three hundred pages (“The Man in Tweed: The City,” “The Man in Tweed: The
Island” and “The Man in Tweed: The Epidemic”), I can’t help thinking about the
flesh and blood being that gave origin to him: is he stuck on another bustling
corner of the big city, his eyes glued to the horizon where the mysteries of
the everyday are brewing?

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]